Storied history of mishaps haunts Met

Sunday

Mar 30, 2008 at 12:01 AMMar 30, 2008 at 10:15 AM

NEW YORK -- When tenor Gary Lehman slid down the raked stage into the prompter's box March 18 during a performance of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, stopping the show at the start of Act III, he became part of a storied history of mid-

NEW YORK -- When tenor Gary Lehman slid down the raked stage into the prompter's box March 18 during a performance of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, stopping the show at the start of Act III, he became part of a storied history of mid-

performance mishaps at the Metropolitan Opera.

This was the second consecutive time in the six-performance Tristan revival that trouble halted the production. Four days earlier, Deborah Voigt, who was singing Isolde, left the stage during Act II because of a stomach ailment and was replaced by her cover, Janice Baird, who made her Met debut.

Lehman made his Met debut during that performance, replacing John Mac Master. Mac Master -- the original replacement for Ben Heppner, who had canceled his first four performances because of a viral infection -- struggled with the role vocally, the Met said, because of allergies.

Lehman was not seriously injured by his fall and finished the performance. Robert Dean Smith took over the role for the performance that was broadcast live and in movie theaters March 15. And, according to an Associated Press story, since Tristan und Isolde opened March 10, every performance has been marked by some casting crisis, and no single pair of singers has made it through the entire opera more than once.

"It seems this production's run has been somewhat star-crossed," said Peter Gelb, the Met's general manager. "There are risks in any production, but certainly what happened was a fluke. And, when you consider that the Met is a repertory theater, with so many different performances, it's remarkable how few mishaps occur."

Tristan und Isolde has long been a magnet for trouble. Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, the first Tristan in 1865, died of a heart attack at age 29 in Munich, Germany, within weeks of the premiere, leaving the first Isolde -- his wife, Malvina -- a widow.

In 1959, when each of three possible Tristans announced, one after another, that he was too ill to perform at the Met, Rudolf Bing, the opera's general manager, persuaded each to sing one of the three acts. The Tristan for Act I was Ramon Vinay; for Act II, Karl Liebl; and for Act III, Albert da Costa.

Among the backstage jokes that evening was a report that the maestro, Karl Boehm, had refused to conduct with only one Isolde (Birgit Nilsson). Another suggested that the opera should be renamed Der Saengerkrieg im Cornwall (The Song Contest in Cornwall).

And a stagehand's voice was supposedly heard from the flies, asking: "You got somebody covering for me up here? I don't feel so hot."

Nor are mishaps limited to Tristan und Isolde. Soprano Hildegard Behrens got bonked on the head by a foam-rubber beam during the immolation scene in Wagner's Goetterdaemmerung at the Met in 1990. Behrens, playing Bruennhilde, had just finished the last notes of the six-hour opera. She withdrew from the final performance and was replaced by Gudrun Volkert.

And after singing the line "You can only live so long" from a ladder minutes into the Met premiere of Janacek's Makropulos Case in 1996, Richard Versalle fell 10 feet to the stage, having suffered a fatal heart attack at 63. The show was canceled, and Versalle's replacement, Ronald Naldi, didn't climb the ladder in future performances.

"Everybody went into shock," said Joseph Volpe, then the Met's general manager. "They thought it was part of the staging."

Asked to recount some of his run-ins with the tenor Luciano Pavarotti and his temperamental throat, such as when Pavarotti failed to appear for his farewell performances at the Met, in Tosca in 2002, Volpe said, "I'm not going there."

The debate continues as to whether, during the Met's 2002 production of Prokofiev's War and Peace, a supernumerary portraying one of Napoleon's defeated soldiers fleeing Moscow (Simon Deonarian) fell or jumped into the pit.

Volpe -- who took the stage at the end to tell the audience that "our retreating French grenadier lost his way in the snowstorm" but was unhurt -- said he jumped for publicity. Deonarian said he fell.

The incident stopped the orchestra during the final scene for three minutes.

When the American Ballet Theater was performing Romeo and Juliet on the Met stage in 1998, the front of the Capulet mansion came down.

"The set just kept grinding into the floor," said Michael M. Kaiser, then the ballet's artistic director. "No one's ever seen me run so fast as I did backstage."

As for conflagrations, the curtain came down in 2004 during Act II of Rossini's L'Italiana in Algeri because of a small fire above the stage that had to be extinguished.

The Metropolitan Opera House has also had its brush with murder. In 1981, a Met stagehand, Craig Crimmins, was sentenced to 20 years-to-life in prison for hurling a violinist, Helen Hagnes Mintiks, to her death down an air shaft from the roof of the opera house. Mintiks had disappeared during an intermission of a Berlin Ballet performance.

"Let me tell you why I'm having such a good time now," said Volpe, who retired in 2006. "Because I don't have this problem. I don't have to deal with these things."

"It seems this production's run has been somewhat star-crossed."

Peter Gelb general manager

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